The president is trying to square environmentalists’ demands to stop burning fossil fuels with labor leaders' desire for union jobs linked to oil and gas.
Photo by John Anderson
The upcoming May 1 special election provides Austinites with an opportunity to fundamentally change the structure of city government. To some, these changes are revolutionary advances toward a more robust local democracy; to others, they threaten to cause a catastrophic collapse of Austin s current progressive consensus. Either way, a very big deal.
Five of the eight city propositions on the May 1 ballot – Propositions D through H – are charter amendments that began life last July in the mind of Andrew Allison, a local entrepreneur with previous lives as an attorney and political speechwriter. That was at the peak of public outcry against Austin police Chief Brian Manley for (among a slew of other missteps) the Austin Police Department s gross mishandling of the May 31 Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality, sparked by the killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and, a month earlier, Mike Ramos here in Austin.
Illinois Indigenous rights activists, tribal governments and environmentalist groups are joining a national call for the Biden administration to shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline after the Illinois Commerce Commission approved a project to double its capacity last October.
The pipeline currently transports 570,000 barrels of hydrofracked oil per day from the Bakken region of North Dakota to Patoka, Illinois, where it is then often shipped to oil refineries in Illinois and the Gulf Coast. In October 2020, the commission agreed to allow Energy Transfer Partners, the corporation that controls the pipeline, to add pumping stations and equipment that could transport up to 1.1 million barrels of oil per day.
New Bill Could Raise Standards for Awarding Construction Contracts Legislation introduced by Metro Councilmember Sandra Sepulveda seeks to incentivize safety, training and compensation for workers Tweet Share
On Tuesday evening, Metro Councilmember Sandra Sepulveda plans to introduce a new bill that could raise Nashville’s standards for awarding construction contracts, emphasizing workplace safety and fair payment and compensation.
“We ve been working on this for about a year, and we came to the table with several unions and several worker groups, and we’ve heard it all,” says the District 30 councilmember. “We ve heard wage-theft stories, we ve heard lack of sanitary facilities. … We ve heard people who aren t trained. We ve heard about retaliation.”